A Commentary on the Passing Scene by
Robert Paul Wolff
rwolff@afroam.umass.edu

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The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."

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Tuesday, June 30, 2015

I'M BAAACCCK

Susie and I are home after a complicated trip that included
a stop in Amherst, MA to see old friends.I promised to respond to the many interesting comments provoked by my
posts on the transition to socialism, and I shall, but in various ways, the
world has preempted our cozy discussion.I refer not only to the two dramatic Supreme Court decisions, the first
of which was announced while I was in the air over the Atlantic, but also to the
terrible murders in South Carolina and the crisis unfolding in Greece.Sufficient unto the day, as they say.I shall get to all of that anon.

Let me begin by responding to the comment of Wallace Stevens
and others about cooperatives and other innovative arrangements within
capitalism that may point the way to a transition to socialism.I recently read an interesting book by Gar
Alperovitz called What Then Must We Do:
Straight Talk About The Next American Revolution.[I hope I am recalling this correctly.I cannot find it on my shelves.]As I remember, Alperovitz at one point
itemizes the enormous number of cooperatives of all sorts that already exist --
operations a good deal larger and more economically significant than farmers'
markets.I see these as real world
experiments from which we can learn.I
have always been sceptical of such efforts because they seemed to me to be so
small in scale next to the great collections of capital that we call corporations,
but perhaps I have dismissed them too hastily.

By the way, magpie is of course right that my account of CEO
pay is only part of the story.His comment
illustrates my more general point, which is that capitalism as we know it now
is so complex that no simple story about a transition to socialism will suffice.My reaction to that complexity is always the
same:Let us start with a massive
redistribution of income, and see what changes that works in the economy as a
whole.Then perhaps we will see more
clearly what the next step must be. Of
course, when we talk about such a redistribution [say two trillion dollars a
year from the richest to the poorest], we immediately realize how far we are
from the political power to carry out even that sort of amelioration,
temporizing as it is and far as it is from anything we could ever call
socialism.

Wallace Stevens' initial comment raises a good many
important questions, which I shall put off responding to until tomorrow.[I am still sorting through five weeks of
mail, almost all of which is catalogues.aasarrrggghhh!]Two points that
call for some response:First, the importance
of examining the actual historical examples of revolutions made in the name of
Marx or communism -- Russia, China, perhaps Cuba;and second, the question whether there is a
conflict between the celebration of individual rights [Black Liberation,
Women's Liberation, Gay Liberation, etc.] and the communitarianism seemingly
inseparable from the socialist ideal.Let me try to say something about those topics tomorrow.

Oh, by the way, Susie and I sat in our favorite cafe in
Paris and watched Serena Williams win the French Open.That was in many ways the high point of our
stay.

1 comment:

I've been a learner from the blog rather than a contributor lately during interesting contributions about matters of which I am mostly dumb (though now less dumb). However, here's a contribution I can make, a link to a discussion on the Philadelphia Public Radio station today of the supreme court's decisions on the use of lethal injections and same-sex marriage in which one of the discussants was Tobias Barrington Wolff, son of a famous blogger. Best wishes.

About Me

As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.